soliloquy: “Why is the phoneme the most ‘ideal’ of signs? .. . When I speak, it belongs to the
phenomenological essence of this operation that I hear myself [je m’entende: hear and
understand] at the same time that I speak. . . . As pure auto-affection, the operation of hearing
oneself speak seems to reduce even the inward surface of one’s own body. :.. This auto-
affection is no doubt the possibility for what is called subjectivity.” (VP 86-87, 88, 89; SP 77,
79)
The suggestion is, then, that this phonocentrism-logocentrism relates to centrism itself—the
human desire to posit a “central” presence at beginning and end:
The notion of the sign . . . remains within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a
phonocentrism: absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of
voice and the ideality of meaning. . . We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism
merges with the historical de-termination of the meaning of being in general as presence, with
all the sub-determinations which depend on this general form . . . (presence of the thing to the
sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence (ousia), temporal presence as point
(stigmè) of the now or of the moment
(nun), the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness,
subjectivity, the co-presence of the other and of the self, intersubjectivity as the intentional
phenomenon of the ego, and so forth). Logocentrism would thus support the determination of
the being of the entity as presence. (23, 11—12)
Lacan’s phallocentrism, extending, as Derrida sees it, Freud’s metaphysical bondage, fits into
this pattern: “Freud, like his followers, only described the
((lxix))
necessity of phallogocentrism. . . . It is neither an ancient nor a speculative mistake. . . . It is
an enormous and old root.” (FV 145)
It is this longing for a center, an authorizing pressure, that spawns hierarchized oppositions.
The superior term belongs to presence and the logos; the inferior serves to define its status
and mark a fall. The oppositions between intelligible and sensible, soul and body seem to
have lasted out “the history of Western philosophy,” bequeathing their burden to modem
linguistics’ opposition between meaning and word. The opposition between writing and
speech takes its place within this pattern.
In the spirit of interpretation rather than of commentary, I have de-scribed the structure of
writing as the sign under erasure. It would now be appropriate to recall the opening pages of
this Preface, and call the structure of writing “metaphysics under erasure.” Trace-structure,
everything always already inhabited by the track of something that is not itself, questions
presence-structure. If “the present of self-presence . .. [seems] as indivisible as the blink of an
eye” (VP 66, SP 59), we must recognize that “there is a duration to the blink, and it closes the
eye.” (VP 73, SP 65) This presence of the trace and trace of the presence Derrida names
“archiécriture.”
You will participate in the slow unfolding of these arguments in the first part of Of
Grammatology. I shall not “repeat” them at length here. But I shall point out again what I
have pointed at before: the name “writing” is given here to an entire structure of investigation,
not merely to “writing in the narrow sense,” graphic notation on tangible material. Thus Of
Grammatology is not a simple valorization of writing over speech, a simple re-versal of the
hierarchy, a sort of anti-McLuhan. The repression of writing in the narrow
sense is a pervasive
symptom of centrism and that is why much of our book concerns itself precisely with that.
The usual notion of writing in the narrow sense does contain the elements of the structure of
writing in general: the absence of the “author” and of the “subject-matter,” interpretability, the
deployment of a space and a time that is not “its own.” We “recognize” all this in writing in
the narrow sense and “repress” it; this allows us to ignore that everything else is also
inhabited by the structure of writing in general, that “the thing itself always escapes.” (VP
165, SP 104) Derrida’s choice of the words “writing” or “arche-writing” is thus not fortuitous.
Indeed, as Derrida repeatedly points out in the section on Lévi-Strauss, no rigorous distinction
between writing in the narrow and the general senses can be made. One slips into the other,
put-ting the distinction under erasure. Writing has had the negative privilege of being the
scapegoat whose exclusion represents the definition of the metaphysical enclosure.
Yet the choice of “writing” is also polemical, against the manifest phono-centrism of
structuralism. And this is precisely what has sometimes led to
((lxx))
that general misunderstanding, to the hasty view that Derrida seems to be restoring priority to
writing over speech in the study of language. But this is, of course, a very hasty view. A
careful reading of the Grammatology shows quickly that Derrida points out, rather, that
speech too—grafted within an empirical context, within the structure of speaker-listener,
within the general context of the language, and the possibiliy of the absence of the speaker-
listener (see page liii)—is structured as writing, that in this general sense, there is “writing in
speech” (ED 294). The first part of the book is entitled “Writing Before the Letter”—writing
before the fact of writing in the narrow sense. The second part, “Nature, Culture, Writing,”
shows how, in the texts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the declared
opposition between Nature and Culture is undone by both the empirical fact and the structure
of writing.
But if there is no structural distinction between writing and speech, the choice of “writing” as
an operative term is itself suspect, and a candi-date for legible erasure. Derrida puts it this
way: “This common root, which is not a root but the concealment of origin and which is not
common because it does not come to the same thing except with the unmonotonous insistence
of difference, the unnamable movement of difference-itself which I have strategically
nicknamed trace, reserve, or differance, can be called writing only within the historical
enclosure, that is to say within the boundaries of metaphysics.” (142, 93).
If, in other words, the history of metaphysics could have been different, this problematic
“common root” could have been named “speech.” But, according to the only metaphysics and
the only language we know or can know, the text of philosophy (of the so-called “sciences of
man,” of litera-ture . . .) is always written (we read it in books, on tape, through the psychic
machine); yet that text is always designated by philosophy (and so forth) to be speech (“Plato
says . . . ,” or at most, “it is as if Plato said ...”).”Writing” is “immediate(ly) repressed.” What
is written is read as speech or the surrogate of speech. “Writing” is the name of what is never
named. Given differance, however, it is a violence even to name it thus, or name it with a
proper name. One can tolerate nothing more than the nick-naming of bricolage.
Derrida would not privilege a signifier into transcendence. The move-ment of “difference-
itself,” precariously saved by its resident “contradiction,” has many nicknames: trace,